Eight Ways Snakes on a Plane Changed Movies Forever

Call it the motherf---ing power of the internet

By Kirk Miller

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18 August 2016

Happy 10 years, Snakes on a Plane.

The ridiculous 2006 Samuel L. Jackson thriller was something of a disappointment during its initial run, earning only $34 million despite months of intense internet scrutiny leading up to its release. Story-wise, it was a tolerable B-movie (“All anyone really needs to know about this amusingly crude, honestly satisfying artifact is snakes + plane + Samuel L. Jackson” wrote the New York Times). I went opening night. We cheered. A few people dressed up and threw rubber snakes. Otherwise, it was forgettable.

But the power of Snakes came not from the movie itself, but everything that happened before and after its release. As a prognosticator for how movies are made today and the influence internet culture has on the film industry, it became a gold standard.

So let’s review the film’s legacy one decade out. It certainly goes beyond one motherf***ing line.

The film was the first to “crowdsource” input from fansThanks to early fan reaction (of the negative ilk), the movie went through days of reshoots, added dialogue and switched from a tame PG-13 to a gorier R rating. “[Snakes] is theoretically the first Wikipedia-ised movie, created by the users themselves,” noted the Guardian right after the film’s release. Brian Finkelstein’s ridiculously popular SnakesOnABlog.com (a repository of all SOAP memes) landed the Georgetown law student an all-expenses-paid trip to the film’s Hollywood premiere alongside star Samuel L. Jackson, as well as a Q&A session with the star at San Diego Comic-Con. (That said, Finkelstein lost interest after the film’s release, let the site domain lapse and even forgot about the film’s five-year anniversary.)

It’s an important part of Samuel L. Jackson’s legacyJackson actually chose to star in the film based on its ridiculous title. “My agents have finally figured out that I'm going to do what I want,'' he told Entertainment Weekly. ''Every now and then, I want to do a movie that isn't 'stretching my abilities.' It's that simple.'' He also successfully challenged the producers after someone suggested a name change to the incredibly dull Pacific Air Flight 121 (“The stupidest damn thing I ever heard,” he told Time).

It gave us one of the best lines in movie history

A line supposedly created by a fan named Chris Rohan who had crafted his own R-rated audio trailer for Snakes on a Plane.

And then it gave us the worst edit in movie history

The terrible TV edit of Snakes (where “motherf---ing” became “monkey fighter”) started its own Internet meme. Stephen Colbert used it as a punchline. And this was three years after the film.

The film shed light on the actual problem of motherf---ing snakes on motherf---ing planesThis seemstohappena lot.

It perfected targeted marketingAn AI program created by VariTalk utilized combinations of Samuel L. Jackson’s voice to make 1.5 million “personalized” calls to fans who signed up on the Snakes movie site. Imagine that: people willingly giving out their private info to a company just to receive a dumb marketing message.

A bit of a stretch, but you could say the film helped us get over 9/11A fun movie about terror in the skies, less than five years after a horrible airborne terrorist attack? Some writers noticed. “Snakes on a Plane is less about surviving on airplanes than wresting control of them. In other words, it’s United 93 without the tears,” said Manohla Dargis of the New York Times. A book called Horror After 9/11 spent nearly a whole chapter (“Let’s Roll”) dissecting Snakes in a post-9/11 world and also comparing it to United 93.

Then again, maybe it was just a stupid film.

As critic Peter Bradshaw noted: “Not every plane-crisis film is a terrorism metaphor, or a reflection of the post-9/11 mindset … As Sigmund Freud once said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a film with the silly but entertaining title of Snakes on a Plane, is just a silly but entertaining film about snakes on a plane.”